How Growth in Dairy Is Affecting the Environment

Cows in a freestall barn at a dairy in Tulare County, California. The region suffers from severe air pollution, in part from the dust, methane and manure of dairy farms.CreditFranklin Avery

By Beth Gardiner

May 1, 2015

SHAFTER, Calif. — On a map he keeps in his office, Tom Frantz, an environmental activist and retired math teacher, notes a spot near his home that he says is within a five-mile radius of 10 big dairy farms and about 60,000 cows. This town, in the very fertile but poor and badly polluted San Joaquin Valley in California, is near the heart of dairy country in a state that produces 20 percent of America’s milk.

With industrial-scale farms that each house thousands of cows, the region is also at the center of a global debate about dairy’s impact on the environment. Worldwide, demand for milk products is skyrocketing, particularly in developing economies like China and India, where increasing prosperity and urbanization have brought a growth in Western tastes.

Dairy consumption jumped 32 percent from 1990 to 2005, and is expected to rise an additional 50 percent from 2005 levels by 2050, according to the United Nations Food and Agriculture Organization.

Climate-warming gases emitted by manure, feed production, milk processing and even cows’ burping are a concern. But the F.A.O. says that globally, the dairy industry has made real environmental strides since 2006, when it warned that livestock was one of the two or three most environmentally damaging sectors, polluting “on a massive scale.”

In the San Joaquin Valley, though, environmentalists and residents say they are still paying the price for the world’s taste for milk, cheese and yogurt, in the form of tainted water, terrible odors, flies and fumes that add to the region’s severe air pollution.

“My father’s life was shortened and his quality of life was decreased by air pollution,” said Mr. Frantz, who heads the Association of Irritated Residents, which has, with some success, repeatedly sued regulators and local businesses, including dairies, over environmental concerns. “I see my daughter getting migraines when she comes here to visit.”

He said he suffered from headaches, and “if I go to a dairy when the air is already bad, it is 10 times worse within a half mile of that dairy.”

The American Lung Association says the region suffers from America’s highest levels of the tiny, airborne pollution particles that are linked to ailments like heart attacks and strokes. Many sources contribute, including heavy truck traffic and the dairy and feed processing facilities whose vast tanks and chutes line Highway 99. Nearby mountains exacerbate the problem by holding stagnant air in place.

Near a big cow farm in Riverdale, residents “are not comfortable even going outside on most summer days, they’re not comfortable inviting people to their homes and they’re not comfortable having their children play outside,” said Cesar Campos, coordinator at the Central California Environmental Justice Network, in Fresno. “Dairies, there is that smell attached to it, it is impossible for the community to ignore.”

The industry says it complies with all environmental rules. Doing so is expensive, particularly for small farms that are already struggling, and often must hire someone to handle regulatory reporting, said Lynne McBride, executive director of the California Dairy Campaign, which mainly represents small operators.

“Our dairy farm families, they live and work on their operations, they are stewards of the land, they consider the health of their soil and the environment there to be paramount,” she said. But small farms are closing across California, in part because dairy owners cannot pass such costs on to customers. “They’re price-takers, they’re not price-setters,” she said.

A host of environmental concerns stem from the concentration of cows in huge farms known as concentrated animal feeding operations, “basically cows in a building with feed that is imported from somewhere else,” said Anne Mottet, the livestock policy officer at the F.A.O. in Rome. “It’s disconnected from the land.”

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Tom Frantz, a local resident and environmental activist in the San Joaquin Valley of California, says pollution from dairy farms gives his daughter migraines.CreditBeth Gardiner

With high-quality feed like soy and corn, cattle on such farms can be very productive, so fewer greenhouse gases are emitted per unit of milk produced, she said. But the huge amounts of manure produced without sufficient land in need of fertilizing can create air and water problems for nearby communities, Ms. Mottet said.

Water worries focus on leakage of nutrients like nitrogen and phosphorus, as well as dangerous bacteria including E.coli. Ammonia wafts into the air from manure lagoons, and gases known as volatile organic compounds are created by the huge piles of feed, 15 feet high and nearly as large as football fields, that ferment beneath white plastic tarps.

Managing manure responsibly is key to running a good dairy and the focus of much regulation, said J.P. Cativiela, program coordinator for Dairy Cares, an industry group whose members include big American brands like Kraft Foods and Land O’Lakes. Proper location is also critical, since dairies should not sit next to residential areas, he said.

Regulators at the San Joaquin Valley Air Pollution Control District say dairy emissions are not a health risk, and the United States Environmental Protection Agency said curbing them was not the best way to improve local air quality, though climate gases are another matter.

Local environmentalists, however, see the agencies as reluctant to confront powerful agricultural interests.

Large-scale dairies exist in Europe, too, but are generally much smaller than those in the United States. The expiration on April 1 of European Union milk quotas, in place for more than 30 years to prevent overproduction, is likely to lead to an expansion of such intensive farming, said Sandra Vijn, dairy director for the World Wildlife Fund in Washington.

The resulting increase in European demand for cattle feed could cause environmental problems in Latin America, where forests are cleared to grow soy for export, Ms. Vijn said, noting that the concern underlined the global nature of the dairy industry.

In China, factory-scale dairies began to appear more than a decade ago, and regulation early on was poor and pollution rampant, said Ms. Mottet of the F.A.O. Practices are now improving, she said, spurred by citizens’ concerns about air and water quality.

Globally, dairy production accounted for 2.8 percent of all man-made climate-warming gases in 2005, the most recent year for which data is available, she said.

On his computer, at home amid Shafter’s almond fields, Mr. Frantz pulled up a satellite map showing a yellow-orange blob indicating elevated levels of the potent climate-warming gas methane over the region. “That’s not an industrial area,” he said, pointing. “There’s no source of methane except the cows.”

Given that agriculture as a whole produces almost a quarter of all greenhouse gas emissions, the dairy figure is not so large, Ms. Mottet said, adding that with improved techniques, there is a lot of room to reduce it.

In California, Mr. Cativiela of Dairy Cares said 1 percent to 2 percent of dairies processed manure in airtight tanks, called digesters, that turn the methane into renewable energy. New incentives for addressing climate change will probably lead to increased use of the tanks, he said.

“There’s a lot of interest in getting that going and there’s opportunity that did not exist even five years ago,” he said.

Such measures will not solve the problems of those living nearby.

“Summer evenings, when the air’s real still, every one of those cows is kicking up dust with every step, manure dust,” Mr. Frantz said. “That cloud of dust can float right into your home, right over it, through the cracks. It’s manure that you’re breathing, not even dirt.”